Is Everyday Sexism unfair to men?

The Everyday Sexism website has garnered more than 60,000 entries in two years
and been adopted in 18 countries. Chris Moss reads founder Laura
Bates’s new book and asks if men are being presented fairly

“My manager bullied and sexually harassed me over a period of a year. In December last year he grabbed my face with both his hands and licked around my lips as if he was kissing me. I pulled my lips tightly together to stop his tongue in my mouth. When he released my face I put my face in my hands and said go away. He then said ‘mop the wet patch from under your chair woman’.”

There are times when being a man is shaming by association. That the manager character above is not only credible but familiar reflects the depressing realities of office life. We don’t know the age of the man in question, nor the woman, nor the details of their previous encounters. But do we need to? The woman who reported this may have been frightened of being sued for libel, or sacked. But in any good, decent world, the above exchange is sickening as well as banal.

Taken from the new book, Everyday Sexism, compiled by Laura Bates, this is just one of many eyewitness denunciations collected under chapters with titles such as ‘Women in Public Spaces’, ‘Women in the Media’ and ‘Women in the Workplace’. Those looking for a fight might wonder if the book might just as well have been titled ‘Things We Don’t Like About Men’, but the selection and presentation of the testimonies is curated. Bates, who created the website everydaysexism.com in April 2012, from which the book takes much of its raw material, is not out to get men, but primarily to allow ordinary – or, as she says, “real” – women a space in which to air their fears, frustrations, sense of injustice and outrage. She supplies hard facts and polemic between the entries, which serves to provide a variety of tone but doesn’t in any way lessen the impact of the witness statements.

Quoting a PhD-educated woman who returned to work after having a baby to find herself demoted (her “new boss… stated that while I was nursing it will be difficult to focus on my job”), Bates appends the shocking evidence that while it is illegal for women to be selected for redundancy because of pregnancy, the Equal Opportunities Commission revealed, in 2005, that 30,000 women every year lose their jobs as a result of pregnancy discrimination.

But it’s not only the individual men who lurk behind the stories that should worry us. Taken together, we present a spectacle of unfunny, unpleasant, patronising, cowardly, aggressive, and often violent physical and sexual harassment. That the mass media, judicial system and government – all versions of male-dominated clubs or gangs – permit and reinforce sexist stereotypes is hardly surprising, but what is most depressing is the collective collusion of ordinary men. Time and again, these accounts give the impression that groups of men, and boys, stick together in their refusal to take on the more abhorrent individuals in their midst, and their preferred hiding place is humour. There’s nothing like a group giggle or guffaw to disguise shame and embarrassment. One woman reports a classic instance of objectification:

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“I worked at a top law firm in recruitment and have heard partners assessing female candidates according to their attractiveness.”

While a girl recounts this:

“… one of the boys started joking about gang raping me and saying really vulgar and inappropriate things. All of the boys started laughing…”

Everyday Sexism finds space for chapters called “What about the men?”, highlighting the damage sexism does to men’s self-image and psyche, and “Double discrimination”, which considers the compound prejudices against women who are overweight, from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, LGBT, physically disabled or ill, or just older than, say, forty. But the overall thrust of the book is to show men as a problem, and their attitudes as retrograde and repugnant.

That women need a safe forum in which to say all these things is self-evident. In less than two years, Bates’s website has attracted 60,000 entries and its twitter account has more than 140,000 followers.

“For people who experienced rape or assault in particular, many have said it has been very cathartic and healing to have their story heard,” says Bates. “We also hear from a lot of people, especially young women, who have felt able to report an assault for the first time as a result of the project, not having realised before that it would be taken seriously.”

The Everyday Sexism project has been taken to 17 other countries already, including some – Argentina, Italy, Brazil, Russia – where sexism is even more entrenched and extreme than in the UK.

But the book is a product of social media and – ironic as this sounds – feels like a monologue. Bates has no time for issues such as the sexualisation of men in advertising (it’s a “trump card”, she says) or any kind of male-centred activism (she quotes journalist Ally Fogg, who compares men’s rights movements to “old-fashioned conspiracy theorists”). In this respect, there’s something old-fashioned about the whole discourse; at times I felt I was being sent to hell by a Calvinist preacher or being shouted at from a soapbox at Speaker’s Corner.

Digital technologies have unleashed a whole new order of sexism, with extreme pornography at one end of the spectrum and the power to anonymously attack women in the most offensive terms possible at the other. Bates, who deserves to be commended for her initiative and zeal in devising the Everyday Sexism Project, has been on the receiving end of a litany of abusive emails.

Denying the nastiness in these messages is as meaningless as denying the evil in weapons of mass destruction or torture. But they are the products of a new form of media as well of the male mind. The overall mood of the book is that while feminism is experiencing something of a revival among young women (sometimes called “the fourth wave”), men’s attitudes, assumptions and behaviour are, if anything, getting worse. A new feminism – with men on board – will have to recognise the weaknesses as well as the strengths of social media. Shouting out – or #shoutingback, the favoured hashtag of Twitter feminists – will only go so far.

But I do recognise the men in the pages of Everyday Sexism, and all men will occasionally recognise the worst aspects of their own nature in the behaviour of some of the men being described here. We men have a problem, and for women we are a problem. The male mind can only be rewired over time and by degrees (as well as decrees), and I have no doubt that occasionally a scourging is what our sneaky, sniggering, simian sex needs. That’s why Everyday Sexism is an important book, even if it’s the most depressing one you’re likely to read this year.